Hawksworth Full Brake

The class 22 is in the paint shop (scary) so something new has taken its place on the workbench - an Ultima kit for a Hawksworth full brake.

These coaches survived well into the 1970s in rail blue, so this will fit neatly into my chosen period. I also happen to think that the Hawksworth coaches are some of the finest looking coaches ever built, so I don't need much of an excuse to build one. I'm planning to make life difficult for myself by painting it maroon and using my new Bob Moore lining pen - rail blue seems a bit too boring for this vehicle.

This is the first Ultima kit that I've built. It consists of brass sides and floor and plastic roof and ends, so I'm a bit concerned about the strength of the finished article. I'm also rather reluctant to follow the instructions and glue everything up into a closed box because I just know that I will need access to the inside at some point in the future.

The kit is not a beginner's model - for example the instructions seem to be 3 years older than the brass floor etch and suggest that the floor is made of aluminium. I'm guessing that this also explains why the moulded bumps on the back of the ends don't seem to be at the right height to match up with the floor.

On the plus side, the etched sides seem pretty clean, as do the moulded roof and ends. In particular the roof is devoid of any bowing, so I'm contemplating fixing the sides and ends to the floor and making the roof removable.

Interior access probably doesn't matter too much for the full brake, but if this goes OK then I am hankering after a couple more Hawksworth vehicles to make up a more mid-60s formation for St Ruth even though the passenger carrying vehicles were all withdrawn by about 1967 and therefore are just a bit too early for me. I seem to be having a bit of a coaching stock phase at the moment - I picked up a couple more Farish Mark 1s at the RMWeb members day and I also have just sent an order to Masterclass Models for some Maunsell brake coaches to form a North Cornwall style 'P' set... which doesn't fit at all with my chosen period or St Ruth's geography.

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You seem to be doing all the stuff I would like / need to do! This isnt a complaint or anything but quite useful!

I really should have taken the time to talk to you a little more at the RMWeb show, it feels like I have missed out a little now....! I am interested in seeing how you put this together though as I have one in my 'gloat box' waiting to be built.

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Having thought about buying one of the Ultima kits for a while, I've just ordered a Thompson corridor coach (and some fittings for the Masterclass Models Thompson non-corridor stock I have on order). They look to be nice kits.

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Having thought about buying one of the Ultima kits for a while, I've just ordered a Thompson corridor coach (and some fittings for the Masterclass Models Thompson non-corridor stock I have on order). They look to be nice kits.

Nice to chat to you at the members day.

Yes, I'm quite happy with the quality of the parts but as I said, persuading them to stay together in the long term is a bit of a worry for me.

I'm hoping that it will make up into a nice model and that my paint job won't turn out too dodgy.

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Good to see another fan of Hawksworth in 2mm . I've enjoyed reading about your class 22, so I'm looking forward to this.

By the way, I found that if I glued a length of 1mm square plastic rod underneath the locating lumps on the back of the ends then they lined up with the floor nicely. That also has the advantage of allowing them to be very firmly glued into place.

I will be interested to see how you get on with your plan for fixing the sides and ends and having the roof removable. While the ends can be firmly attached, I've found that I'm not so confident of the sides - they only end up being properly supported by the ends. One thing I want to consider for the next coach I do is to bend up the floor so that the angle is slightly more than 90 degrees, so that the lip of the bent-up floor also acts as a support for the sides, rather than sitting about 0.25mm further in. Whether this is pratical or not remains to be seen. For the current coach I've gone too far to attempt this now, so I will glue the roof to the ends and then the sides to both the ends and the roof.

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Unfortunately my worries come from past bad experience with using various glues to try to make pieces of brass stay put, most often with coach kits. This is my first Ultima kit, so it's a bit different from the previous scenarios.

I hope you have better luck than I've had in the past and I'm still trying for better results myself. In the hope that my past (bad) experiences might help you, the problems have been...

- Fixing etched brass coach sides to transparent (polystyrene?) on a Fleetline coach kit. I built this coach a LONG time ago. From memory I've tried quick set epoxy, Super Glue and polystyrene solvent. Each one of them has stuck initially but then has come undone after a year or two.

- The same scenario with a BH Enterprises DMU - I used 24 hour epoxy for this. No problems yet (4 years) with it coming unstuck, but it needs firmly holding in place while the glue sets. In my case the glue oozed onto the paintwork when I wasn't looking.

- Fleetline BR GUV - same scenario again. This time I used 24 hour epoxy on one side and Formula 560 Canopy glue on the other. Both had some degree of oozing in spite of my being very careful with the quantity of glue but the Canopy glue is easier to clean up. Both are still in place but it's early days yet.

- Fiddle yard modules - just to prove that there is no end to my adhesive failures... this job involved gluing brass strip to plywood using Evo Stik again it came undone after a few years. There is a film of glue on both the ply and the brass, so it seems that the Evo Stik itself failed. I now use 8BA bolts as well as Evo Stik for this job.

Given so many bad experiences, I'm rather wary about suggesting how to do better, but I'll try...

1. Try to arrange as much surface area as possible when gluing. The turned up edges of the chassis etch seem like prime candidates. Could you add some packing pieces?

2. Pick your glue very carefully and follow the instructions, especially the one about avoiding greasy deposits etc.

3. Depending on how long your glue needs to set, think (beforehand!) about how to hold everything in place and how to avoid or clean up any stray glue

Good luck!

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Thanks for that - I have been intermittently worrying about these issues, but your comments made me realise I need to decide what to do. Some thin styrene strips are on order to pack against the edges of the floor chassis. I'm also struck that it might be a good idea to glue some pieces of 1mm plastic rod vertically to the inside of the ends, to give a much bigger surface area to glue the sides to. More experimentation needed... Oh for an infinite supply of kits to test on!

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Brass on plastic is notoriously problematic with superglue and rigid glues. The differential expansion gradually cracks the rigid and brittle glues and the sides come off.

Only crisis I've had with evostick is that it will lift the print off the screen printed ultima sides/interiors as well as off otherwise waterproof laserprinting such as Scalescenes sheets.

I generally tack the roofs down with a couple of spots of glue. Enough to hold them on but enough I can take them apart. In the Hawksworth case you may also need to think about the filler pipes if you want to keep the roof removable on some coaches

Mine I did in faded rail blue.

Alan

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Thanks for your advice. Glad to see that you can get good results with glue.

You make a good point about the filler pipes - I'll need to give that some thought when I get to build a coach with a loo. So far my coach kit building has been confined to parcels vehicles plus a Mark 2 so I have managed to avoid that issue.